McIntosh College — A 113-Year-Old School a Corporation Decided to Close

Summary

McIntosh College was a career college in Dover, New Hampshire, founded in 1896 as the Dover Business College and shut down in 2009 after 113 years — closed not by the market or a regulator but by the deliberate decision of the for-profit corporation that owned it. It granted associate and bachelor's degrees in vocational fields with local appeal: business management, criminal justice, culinary arts, graphic design, and massage therapy. It was an open-admissions school that served first-generation and working students across New Hampshire's seacoast, and at its height it enrolled roughly 1,000 of them. When it gave its final classes in 2009, just 224 students remained.

The note attached to this case in the registry lists Kaplan Higher Education as the owner. Research does not bear that out, and the truth matters here: from 1999 until its closure, McIntosh was owned and operated not by Kaplan but by Career Education Corporation (CEC), the large publicly traded for-profit operator. The distinction is more than bookkeeping. McIntosh's fate was set by CEC's portfolio strategy — the school was one of nine money-losing campuses the company decided to shed — and CEC, not Kaplan, was the corporate parent that announced first a sale and then, when no buyer materialized, a closure.

That sequence is the whole arc. In November 2006, CEC announced it would sell several underperforming colleges, McIntosh among them; the nine targeted campuses had lost some 30 million dollars in just the first nine months of that year. When the sales did not come together — McIntosh's own president later said he had brought the corporation three purchase offers and it chose to close anyway — CEC announced in February 2008 a "teach-out," an orderly wind-down letting enrolled students finish their programs before the doors shut for good. Over the following year and a half, McIntosh taught out its remaining students and closed in 2009, a 113-year-old institution ended by a line item.

What makes McIntosh quieter than the era's notorious collapses is precisely that it was orderly. There was no abrupt lockout, no bounced payroll, no fraud indictment — a teach-out let the last students graduate, and faculty got stay bonuses and severance. But the dignity of the exit does not change the verdict on the model: a school that had survived two world wars and the Depression as an independent institution lasted barely a decade inside a for-profit chain, closed because it no longer pencilled out. The campus on the Cochecho River was sold off and, in time, redeveloped into apartments and a mixed-use district that still carry the McIntosh name.

Timeline

A Seacoast Institution, 1896 to 1999

For more than a century, McIntosh College was a fixture of Dover, New Hampshire. It opened in 1896 as the Dover Business College, the work of a founder named A.D. Bliss, and took the name it would keep in 1902, when a certified public accountant named David McIntosh bought the school and put his name over the door. It was, for its first century, the kind of independent business and vocational college that dotted New England's mill towns — practical, locally rooted, training young people for clerical and commercial work and, later, for a widening range of trades and professions.

The school's golden age was the long stretch of stable independence that carried it through the twentieth century. It survived the Depression and two world wars as an institution accountable to its own community rather than to shareholders. By the time it earned regional accreditation from NEASC in 1988 — the same accreditor that vouches for New England's liberal-arts colleges and research universities — McIntosh had matured into a credentialed degree-granting college, offering associate and bachelor's programs in business management, criminal justice, culinary arts, graphic design, and massage therapy. It was an open-admissions school, and it took that mission seriously: it served the students other institutions screened out, many of them the first in their families to attend college, drawn from across the seacoast region. At its height roughly 1,000 students passed through its programs.

The faculty understood the place as a mission, not a transaction. Julia K. Littlefield, who taught English and legal studies there for sixteen years, was a retired attorney and former law-review editor who could have taught almost anywhere; she came to McIntosh, she said, because "we have the power to really change people." That sense of purpose was the school's real endowment — and it was exactly the asset that did not appear on a corporate balance sheet.

Inside the Chain

In 1999 McIntosh stopped being an independent New England college and became a unit of Career Education Corporation. (The registry note naming Kaplan as the owner is mistaken; the operator from 1999 to closure was CEC, a different publicly traded for-profit chain.) On paper the acquisition offered scale, capital, and marketing muscle. In practice it folded a 103-year-old community institution into a portfolio where its fate would be decided by its contribution to corporate earnings, not by its standing in Dover.

The for-profit model that absorbed McIntosh ran, like the rest of its sector, on federal Title IV student aid converted into tuition revenue. For a school to justify its place in such a portfolio, it had to enroll and retain enough students to turn a profit; an open-admissions college serving a modest seacoast market, with the higher costs and lower completion rates that population can carry, was always going to be a marginal performer in a spreadsheet that compared it against larger, faster-growing campuses. When the for-profit boom cooled and CEC came under pressure to prune its weakest holdings, McIntosh's century of community service counted for nothing against its quarterly numbers.

The numbers were genuinely bad. The nine CEC campuses eventually targeted for divestiture lost a combined 30 million dollars in just the first nine months of 2006 — losses an analyst at the time described as long-running. From the corporation's vantage, the logic was clean: shed the money-losers. From Dover's vantage, the same logic meant that the calculation determining whether a 110-year-old college lived or died was being made in a boardroom hundreds of miles away, by people for whom McIntosh was one row in a divestiture table.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The teach-out gave McIntosh's students the soft landing that so many closing for-profit schools deny. The final 224 were able to complete their programs rather than being cut off, and faculty received stay bonuses and severance rather than a locked door and a bounced check. That is the best outcome available when a school closes, and it stands in deliberate contrast to the abrupt collapses elsewhere in this file. Still, a teach-out ends the institution; the seacoast lost an open-admissions college that had served first-generation students for 113 years, and the faculty who had treated the work as a vocation lost the place that gave it meaning.

The campus outlived the college, transformed beyond recognition. The buildings, spanning roughly eleven acres along the Cochecho River, passed through interim ownership — for a time three of them belonged to a former president of the college under a lease running to 2016 — before redevelopment took hold. The 19.4-acre Silver Street parcel was sold in 2016 and became Silver Square, a mixed-use district of assisted living, a hotel, medical offices, and retail. The main campus on Cataract Avenue was sold in 2018 and redeveloped into McIntosh Commons, an affordable-housing project of dozens of apartments. The name persists on the Dover landscape, attached now to housing and shops rather than classrooms — a college's century reduced to a place name, which is its own kind of obituary.

Lessons

References

• Tears for a For-Profit College's Demise Inside Higher Ed
• McIntosh College closes in Dover New Hampshire Business Review
• McIntosh College Wikipedia
• McIntosh College (Closed 2009) Community College Review
• Colliers International sells two properties totaling $4.92 million — including the former McIntosh College main campus New England Real Estate Journal